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Trump's NATO Debacle: Elephants on Glass Flooring

Why Trump's Refusal to
Commit Unconditionally to Article 5 is Such a Blow to the Alliance

In international politics, talk is cheap, deception is a
virtue, naiveté and missed opportunities cost dearly. These are among the
lessons I learned years ago from my professor of IR, John Mearsheimer of
University of Chicago. Certainly, Hobbes or Machiavelli would agree with such
statements. But, unlike in the anarchic balance of power world, the
micro-cosmos of collective security systems and is built on unconditional
common commitments and mutual trust. Security alliances’ deterrent power rests,
among other things, on the Musketeerian doctrine of “all for one and one for
all,” as well as on the mutual resolve to apply it. NATO’s Article 5 plays that
precise role and it has been the cornerstone of the alliance’s deterrence power
for near seven decades. That is why Donald Trump’s
speech on May 25th in Brussels to the heads of the member-states of
the alliance, and his failure explicitly and unconditionally to endorse the
collective security principle on which the alliance is built, is a really big
deal. It was the latest of a recent string of attacks by the American president
and his national security team on the alliance’ raison d’etre and modus
operandi. And unlike some assessments, which split
hair on the verbatim reading and interpretation of Article 5, I join
a growing number of analysts who believe that this omission represents perhaps
the biggest blow to date to NATO’s legacy of deterrence.

Trust takes a very long time of repeated interactions to build
and literally no time to destroy. It is enough to cast even a momentary and
ephemeral shadow of doubt to damage or destroy it–sometimes forever. In a
self-help anarchical system, doubt is the norm, while trust is an anomaly, and
cooperation–an exception that is rarely made possible, and only as a pragmatic,
goal-oriented, short-term action. On an operational level, security alliances in general, and NATO
specifically, represent essentially an exceptional case of reiterated
Prisoner’s Dilemma under conditional, and often times force-believed trust, so
that it result in cooperation, and not in defection. Trust is imagined, because
is institutionalized in absolute terms, despite the pragmatic reasons for
doubt. It requires a giant leap of faith for the Baltic or Central and South
Eastern states to believe wholeheartedly in the willingness of the United
States and other major NATO member-states to act, say against Russia, when
needed. In the 1930s Czechoslovakia suffered the consequences from a “quarrel
in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. And so did learn
Ukraine in 2014.

What ensued in Brussels last Thursday was not entirely out of
synch with past debates. NATO, as well as the strategic military partnership of
the U.S. with six Asia-Pacific countries, have endured beyond their natural
shelf-life for over a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War.
During all that time Washington policymakers have struggled to find a new raison
d’etre for keeping such alliances alive, and justify paying for them.

Historically, security alliances have appeared for a large
variety of reasons, and have endured for different periods of time. But they
all have ceased to exist whenever they were rendered irrelevant and obsolete.
NATO has been so far an exception to this rule, despite the fact that its main raison
d’etre, the Soviet Union, was gone. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has
repeatedly been one step away from being rendered obsolete or irrelevant. The
alliance found its identity in the metamorphosis into a sentinel of the liberal
order that the U.S. helped built. It accepted struggling Central and Eastern
European states, even when the European Union kept them out of its gates. It
gave the foundation for the “Euro-Atlantic” geopolitical orientation theme of
the former communist countries, and motivated them to embrace liberal democracy
as the only path to both, collective security and membership into the Western
world. It stopped Slobodan Milosevic and his ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; and it
went in Libya with a mandate from the Security Council of the UN to protect
ordinary Libyans from Moammar Gaddafi, who had promised to “crush them like
cockroaches.” Despite much criticism it would attract every now and then, some
of which justified and deserved, NATO has also been a remarkably well working
security system–one of its kind.

Paradoxically, the period when NATO was arguably the least relevant–during the immediate
post-Cold War period throughout the 1990s and early 2000s–is also the time when
it showed the most remarkable unity and vision for its existence. With growing
threats all around, NATO today becomes more, not less relevant. Putting the
principle of unconditional dedication to Article 5 is undermining its
deterrence power and destroying the fragile trust in its modus operandi. For
what is worth, the trust on which is built resembles a glass floor over an
abyss on which elephants walk–it requires a harmonized effort to balance the
weight, and a leap of faith not to panic that the glass will shatter under
their feet. Paradoxically, the glass is most at risk of breaking when members
panic and stop believing it will endure.

Many hoped that candidate
Trump’s frivolous campaign rhetoric of attacking U.S. allies, NATO as
well as the Asia-Pacific strategic partners, and threatening that America will
not fulfill its security obligations unless they pay more, will take a step
back to a more politically responsible policy by the president Trump. His insistence for more
committed financial contributions to the NATO budget by the other member-states
is actually justified. During the Cold War, the U.S. had extended its security
umbrella rather unconditionally over Western Europe and selective Asia-Pacific
countries, and footed most of the bill for it. Certainly, it was not led in it
by genuine altruism but by
its own national interest.

As the members of NATO, and the Asia-Pacific partners grew
richer and benefited from the U.S. security umbrella, it is only fair to pay
more in the common war chest. Some of the U.S. allies continue to free-ride
largely on America’s good will, and continue to slack in their duty to cover
their fair share for the collective self-defense, despite their repeated
promises to increase their contributions. Japan, for example, can easily handle
at least double of the current security price tag it pays for hosting U.S.
military forces on its land, and still have it cheaper than the alternative of
providing security for its self. The same would be for most NATO members, too,
many of whom are yet to hit the agreed 2% target of their budgets’ spending for
defense. But it is a big mistake for the president of the United States to make
such negotiations public, and to use the unconditional commitment to the
collective security principle as a bargaining chip.

It is not the principle or the motivation that is questioned
here, but the way that Trump approached the matter. Even if there are
compelling reasons to negotiate over price and financial commitments, this
should be done in private, never in public. Public statements command powerful
symbolism that can have far reaching consequences. It all makes sense for a
businessman, who is accustomed to seize opportunities to cut his cost, and
drive profit, using vulnerabilities of partners in a business enterprise
adventure in times when they are in crisis. Nothing sells cheaper on the New
York real estate market than a property, beleaguered by financial difficulties;
and, nothing twists arms of a beleaguered partner to sell cheap and take a loss
on a valuable property than when besieged by predatory debtors. Trump knows his
market niche, and his business strategy all too well.

Except, the foreign policy of the richest and most powerful
country in the world is not a place for real estate shark transactions. US is
not some global roving bandit that should ask for protection money from the villages in its vicinity, or
threaten to let them being sacked by other bandits. As one of the founders and
the leader of the international liberal order–one, based on laws, principles
and norms, not on a sheer struggle for survival–America cannot afford to
racketeer its partners for protection. True, the cost for maintaining the
U.S.-led order is disproportionately distributed. But so are the benefits and
the stakes. The alternative not only for the NATO allies and the Asia-Pacific
strategic partners, but for the U.S. itself would be even more daring and
costly.

Sadly enough, Trump and his national security advisors believe
that they can scare the allies and partners into submission, and this way cower
them into paying. But they are wrong to do so in the way they did it. Instead,
they may have succeeded in inflicting
a significant damage to the
deterrence credibility of NATO, causing dangerous cracks on the glass flooring
that holds them all suspended above the abyss. Russia and China are all too
happy to see this crisis ensue. Turkey may consider leaving the alliance. The
Baltic and Eastern European countries watch with horror, while powerful forces
of the past inside of them, allied with Russian interests, rise dangerously to
question the reason for staying in NATO, and to call for referendums for a
speedy exit.

After Trump’s blunt refusal to endorse explicitly and
unconditionally NATO’s core deterrence clause, the alliance is undoubtedly much
weaker, while the world–more dangerous. With the fragility of the trust being
imagined and fragile, ironically, Trump’s actions will result in a
self-inflicted wound. He found himself to be in the role of the kid that cried
that the king has no cloths, while the king is America-led NATO–not the best
situation to remain naked on the streets.

A year ago, on the eve of the Brexit vote, many went to bed confident that the referendum was one big showoff event for those who held a deep-rooted, but utterly misplaced, contempt for the political, social, and economic consequences for the UK’s membership in the EU. They expected that at the end of the day sanity would prevail. Their complacency did them in! Then in November, many went to bed in the US, believing that what happened in the UK half a year before was a unique event, Donald Trump's candidacy for the presidency was a joke, and he had virtually no chance of prevailing. Complacent again. If voters - and more importantly, those among them complacent enough to believe that democracy would take care of itself without a robust get-out-the-vote effort - knew then what they know now, they certainly would have gone to the polls. But they didn’t. Instead, they bet on pollsters’ predictions. Their forecasts could not have been more wrong. In the Brexit referendum, only 36% of …